Towards a Social Government? How could we build e-democracy through Internet Social Networks and how...

8/2/2019 Towards a Social Government? How could we build e-democracy through Internet Social Networks and how would

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Universit Ca' Foscari di Venezia

Course: Advanced Management Studies, A.Y. 2011/2012, Term 2

Towards a Social Government?

How could we build e-democracy through Internet Social Networks and how would

such a system change our view about Civil Society functioning

Santagiustina Carlo R. M. A.

811360

[email protected]

ABSTRACT

This paper deals with the use of Internet Social Networks (ISNs) as potential

instruments for the diffusion of e-democracy, for the development of an active

citizenship way of life and for the empowerment of local communities through

participation to political and administrative decision making process. We will try to

understand if ISN e-democracy platforms can potentially become decision making

quasi-markets were participative public decision making is a Social Capital

exchange and accumulating instrument for participants. To make an adherent to

reality investigation, the paper will be constructed upon concrete initiatives and

cases, most of them are from Italy. Case studies that have been chosen are running

prototypes or work(s) in progress, thus, involved citizens are often newcomers in

the world of e-democracy, and, most of them still arent e-democracy believers.

Consequently, participants are at the moment assessing those initiatives and

discussing about opportunities and threats of using the internet and ISN to build

participative governance. Public debate around e-democracy themes emerge

principally during the genesis of a ISN project, therefore opinions and ideas are

clearly visible and thus valuable only in this early conceptualization moment.

Generally, once the method, content and instruments of a e-democracy platform on

ISN are determined, aligned to method, content and instruments people continue to

participate. While, unfortunately, citizens that are non-aligned to instruments,

methods or content often abandon the initiative together with their ideas and

alternative views about e-democracy through ISN, it is also those views that we will

try to capture in this paper. With the hope of building an e-democracyup to the hopes

of its most sincere supporters.

Keywords: Social Network, Social Capital, Networked Governance, e-democracy, e-

government, e-participation, Civil Society, embeddedness, community, social preferences.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]


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INTRODUCTION

In recent years, there has been a radical reinterpretation of citizens role in policy making

and service delivery (Meijer A. J., 2011). As Bovaird T. (2007) correctly observed policy

making is no longer seen as a purely top-down process but rather as a negotiation among

many interacting policy systems. In contrast to the mainstream widespread idea about the

characteristics of e-democracy (as it is described on our knowledge network Wikipedia), all-

inclusive civil society involvement in e-participation projects is a necessary but insufficient

condition for building a Networked Governance model that would be able to correctly and

objectively represent community members otherwise unobservable preferences; because e-

democracy platforms methods, formats and instruments for interaction with public

administrations can alter or influence the preferences expression of individuals.

Furthermore, if e-democracy and participative governance wants to be, thanks to the

forthcoming Gov 2.0 revolution (Microsoft Corporation, 2009), an improvement of

representative democracy towards the future achievement of direct democracy: perfectly

representative of a community social optimum. Then, all citizens should have an equal

opportunity of being regarded in the decision making process and thus determine its outcome.

Moreover, if we aspire to recognize the social and political optimum in a community,assuming

that the abovementioned social optimum truly exists, all individuals should express

themselves without being influenced or induced by social and relational context to adjust

social preferences, publicly spoken or written. However, platforms of interactions of e-

democracy initiatives are by definition open, transparent, multilateral; thus, individuals

interact with the public administration and other citizens at the same time, sharing publicly

opinions and ideas. Openness and transparency has been considered desirable because

administrations wants citizens to be able to evaluate others needs, ideas and opinions to

collectively build alternative solutions to social problems and needs, and only then give the

possibility to citizens to choose between them. For this reason, citizens become recognizable in

their participative activity by other members of their community, groups and clubs.

Consequently, individuals could be tacitly blackmailed or induced to change opinion or to

conceal it, if they know in advance that the expression of a given idea or opinion would cause

them losses of social capital (relationships with other actors and accompanying access

to resources, information, influence and control) within the community or with groups,

clubs and individuals that dislike that idea/opinion or its consequences if expressed. In the

same way, publicness of political and administrative preferences, ideas and opinions,

encourages, by means of positive social capital incentives, more skilled individuals to express

opinions and sustain ideas that would help them most to build and improve their relational

positioning within the community, groups, clubs and other individuals with whom they want

to tighten a social relation, creating and accumulating by those means new social capital, that

could be in future spent (exchanged for favors) in the same way that nowadays we spend

money for goods.

The above mentioned emerging attribute of participative democracy, that is particularly

apparent when using small ISN platforms for e-democracy, is very similar to the social

embeddedness of goods/service markets. Consequently we will start our investigation trying

explaining how social relations networks can influence the outcomes of an e-democracy

decision making process, we will subsequently show how an e-democracy public decision
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracyhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-democracy


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making initiatives can become in this way a social capital market and investment system. For

the author, this characteristic of participative democracy through ISN is key to analyze and

appreciate the functioning of any e-democracy initiative. Consequently the core problematic of

this paper will be understanding how and why a citizen, as a member of a community with a

particular social positioning(s), role(s) and link(s) within it, should (according to the Public

Administration that decides to take into account his opinion), would privately wont to (given

his hidden social preferences) and concretely does (given the consideration of his role and

relations within the community and his research of improving his social positioning)

participate and express some social preferences in a e-democracy initiative through a ISN, and

which are the rewards that one can obtain for his participative effort.

Afterwards, we will try to understand if most popular existing ISN can be used by citizens

and public administrations to construct participated governance for complex People System.

Since we will be talking about la raison dtreand la raison dapparatreof citizens social

preferences, ideas and opinions, that publicly emerge through the use of a ISN for e-democracy

purposes, we consider fundamental for our analysis, to interpret how the image, the historical

role, the typical content and the standing of a ISN and individuals that act within it, can

influence both:

The choice of other individuals to participate or not to the e-democracy initiativeon that ISN.

The preferences, ideas and opinions expressed by individuals while participatingand interacting with government or other citizens through that ISN;

Moreover, we will try to understand if existing ISN can be used as pools of users for pre-e-

democracy tokenistic interactions between public institutions and citizens, for buildingparticipative democracy and diffusing its understructure of values, and if ISN will determine

the success of the concept of internet-based networked governance and its future

implementation. Finally we will describe the first outcomes of our attempt of civil society

mobilization for e-democracy through ISN, that has been done through a page on Facebook

called: Cittadini Italian: Governiamoci con I Social Network (Italian Citizens: Lets govern

ourselves through Social Networks), the initiative has a double purpose:

-First phase. Create debate around the theme of: using existing ISN to interact with the public

administrations, and participate to their decision making activities. The aim of this first part

was principally to receive feedbacks from citizens for drawing up this paper and understandsocial attitude of Facebook users towards such a use of this instrument;

-Second phase. Give to citizens the instruments and cultural knowledge needed to put

pressure on public institutions for implementing e-democracy on the already existing ISN.

This second part is still in an early phase of development.

Since our study will give priority to local initiatives: Where civil society determines or at

least is involved in the definition of the online-systems, platforms instruments and formats of

interaction with the public institution; Particular attention will be given to some e-democracy

initiatives that emerged from Italian local communities has symptom of the need and wish of

citizens for being involved in public decision making process, this part has been done thanks

to the advice of Antonino Mola, member of the directive board of Veneto Region Computer

Systems for E-Government, we thank him for his help.


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E-DEMOCRACY AS A DECISION MAKING QUASI-MARKET WITH

SOCIAL CAPITAL AS THE EXCHANGE CURRENCY

How far are we from the shared-power, no-one-in-charge World described by Crosby B. C.

and Bryson J. M. (2005)? During the last two decades governments and civil society have

begun to foresee how participation does not have to be only in government, as it is already

constructed but also with government in new, collaborative arrangements, some of which

might involve government communicating priorities and people taking action in civil society in

response. (Noveck B. S., 2010) This reinvention of the civil societys role must try to benefit as

much as possible from ICT to build and reinforce the interactions within civil society and with

public institutions, in brief there is a need of building relational networks for active

participation to governance. But how should this participative networks look like? For us

those networks should be social (ISN) in the following sense:

When a computer connects people, it is a social network. Just as a computernetwork is a set of machines connected by a set of cables, a social network is a set of

people connected by a set of socially meaningful relationships. Computer networks

are well configured to support participation in sparse, unbounded networks. Since

the sixties there has been a paradigm shift from definitions (of civil society) in terms of

locality and solidarity and towards definitions in terms of social networks (and social

capital). Computer supported social networks affect the behavior of people using

them and the social systems in which these networks are embedded. Such

communities are ramified and complex networks of kin, friends, workmates who do not

necessarily live in the same neighborhoods. The members of loosely-bounded (or

unbounded) networks have many ties with people who are not members of thoseparticular networks. Their orientation to those networks will not be so intense.

Because so many ties go outside the network, it is likely that the network will be

sparsely-knit. (Moreover) not only do networks link people, they link groups, for

when ties connect two groups, they provide intergroup as well as interpersonal links.

(Wellman B., 1996)

For whom studies social interactions, the main difference between the abovementioned

ISNs and Internet Groups (IGs), is that in the first case (ISNs) people do not necessarily know

membership and boundaries of the system, while in the second case (IGs) we assume that they

do know or at least can know which are the boundaries and who are the members. ISNs

boundaries are supposed to be open to newcomers and their frontier of participation and

membership is thus hardly definable, if not in a static model that freezes reality; only in this

case a ISN can be studied has an IG or multiple IGs sharing the same internet platform.

People who tend to see small village-like, bounded and highly interconnected groups as the

desirable form of living community and fear instable relations should use small IGs, whereas

for who wants to feel free of quickly shifting from an interlocutor to another on a problematic-

driven way, big ISNs should be preferred. In reality, many ISN platforms host both ISNs and

IGs, by giving to users the possibility to discriminate access to different information

published on the platform, in this was an unique ISN platform can attract wider publics and

congregate multiple ISNs and IGs at the same time.Consequently Social Networks are scalableas networks of networks: interpersonal, intergroup, interorganizational and international

(Wellman B., 1996). Moreover, through his research Eger J. (1997) has acknowledged that


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within e-democracy initiatives, Teams, clans, and networks are woven by empathy and trust,

and on their capacity to ensure that partners would be able to do better together than in

isolation. Such networking has emerged naturally among persons sharing some sort of

proximity, and it has had to materialize rather quickly in the form of fruitful results from such

cooperation to ensure that it would survive. This dual constraint (proximity and collaboration

bearing fruits) has led to the rise of community as the locus of such creative interaction and to

the emergence of an effective mobilization of skills and competencies in real time as the sine

qua non of the resilience of the network. The notion of collective intelligence is a way to

capture this mobilization effect and the nurturing of continuous learning that it generates.

The notion of smart community refers to the locus in which such networked intelligence is

embedded. A smart community is defined as a geographical area ranging in size from a

neighborhood to a multicounty region within which citizens, organizations, and governing

institutions deploy an NICT to transform their region in significant and fundamental ways.

Now lets see through some real cases how abovementioned characteristics of ISN platforms

and Smart Communities emerge or not in Italian local e-democracy initiatives :

Terzo Veneto

This e-democracy platform has been developed directly by the Veneto Region to offer to citizens

public listening, dialogue instruments and the operational resources needed to enable the user-

citizen to elaborate proposals, correctly formulate their opinion and finally asses the quality of

administrative action within the Veneto Region. It is structured in the following way:

Terzo Veneto

Demotopia

Wikimap E-Dem. Lab

Coro

Cosultations Surveys

Civil Life

Civil Game Civil Life Lab
http://www.terzoveneto.it/index.php?id=1http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/modules/EDemocracy/index.php?id=6http://www.terzoveneto.it/index.php?id=1


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Demotopia: is designed to be a co-developing and co-designing portal for the proactive

participation of citizens in the government of their Region. To widen the public debate on

sustainable development projects within the territory and planning activity issues. Moreover it

helps engaged Citizens to find sustainers and partners within their local communities that

share the same degree of devotion to participative democracy related topics.

Wikimap: This portal use a google map window to localize e-democracy initiatives,anyone can locate on the map his local e-democracy initiative, adding a brief

descriptions of its nature and his promoters, with a direct link to the official page of his

e-democracy project.

E-Democracy Lab: this page has been developed on Ning ISN platform, to give citizensthe possibility to participate to the elaboration of projects and planning activity of the

Veneto Region, and to discuss with others about e-democracy related topics. To begin

participative activity you need to subscribe and be accepted by the administrators of the

portal, during this phase users are asked to motivate the reasons of their request for

membership and their desired level of involvement in e-democracy projects in this ISN,

at the moment this network has 133 members, most of them claim to be Engaged

Citizens or Professional Experts in e-democracy initiatives.

Coro: is designed to build participation of citizens and stakeholders to legislative activity of the

Veneto Region, moreover it offers to most relevant stakeholders (like unions and representatives

of professional categories) the possibility to participate more actively, in a non tokenistic way, in

the formulation of new laws, by comments and suggestions of changes to draft (Regional)

Laws.

Consultations: Main stakeholders are directly involved in Regional Law drafting, theircomments and suggestions of changes to law are visible to all public, in this way unions

and category representatives lobbying Regional Government and Parliament become

visible to all citizens.

Surveys: Any stakeholder (person or institution), after subscribing can participate tosurveys made by Veneto Regional Parliament that is organized in seven thematic

commissions. The answers to past surveys are archived on a dedicated area and are

made available to the public.

Civil Life: is designed for the participation to governance activity of younger generations, tohelp them develop a sense of responsibility towards community interest related issues. It also

aims to develop a strong sense of belonging and thus identification with civil society for

democractivation of students.

Civil Game: Through a videogame young users can identify themselves with virtuous politicians that desire to develop an electoral campaign program in agreement with

their communities of supporters, obviously to win the elections.

Civil Life Lab: wants to develop projects of e-democracy within schools through theinteraction of a social community composed of teachers, parents and students with the

Veneto Region. At the moment this ISN community has 144 members.
http://www.demotopia.net/http://www.demotopia.net/http://www.demotopia-wikimap.it/http://demotopia.ning.com/?xg_source=badgehttp://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/index.phphttp://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/lista_pdl.phphttp://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/lista_sondaggi.phphttp://www.civillife.it/template.php?pag=16174http://www.civillife.it/template.php?pag=16186http://civillifelab.ning.com/http://civillifelab.ning.com/http://www.civillife.it/template.php?pag=16186http://www.civillife.it/template.php?pag=16174http://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/lista_sondaggi.phphttp://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/lista_pdl.phphttp://www.coro.terzoveneto.it/coro/index.phphttp://demotopia.ning.com/?xg_source=badgehttp://www.demotopia-wikimap.it/http://www.demotopia.net/


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Via Per Via: La Citt che Partecipa

Started in 2010, this project tries to promote active citizenship and social inclusion in the city

of Modena (Italy). For this purpose the city has been devised in four circumscriptions, withineach circumscription the traditionally most inactive social categories (young people and

migrants) are asked through ISN to participate and be involved in a urban recovery project in

one of the four circumscriptions of the city. The goals of this initiatives are:

1. Enable citizens and associations to take care of their territory, through a participativejourney with shared rules that foster the so called microprogettualit diffusa (namely

diffused micro-planning).

2. Debate and tackle territory problems, by creating public spaces in which people canmeet, face each other, find an agreement and shared solutions.

3. Make more user friendly the management and governance of public spaces and goods.To re-approach citizens to collective issues, and last but not least, tie civil society

participation to public decision making, starting from the nearest to citizens level of

community governance: the Circumscriptions.

Only projects that aim to increase the involvement and social inclusion of young people and

migrants in the local circumscription community can be proposed. The ones who want to

submit a proposal must fill a standardized project paper online. To each proposal group will

be granted a volunteer facilitator that is a professionalized Public Governance expert that will

be in charge of helping citizens and thus enable the realization of the project. Finally technical

and legal feasibility as well as financial sustainability will be evaluated before the finalapproval of the project by City Council Circumscriptions Commissions.

Etucosacivedi San Giobbe

This e-democracy initiative is organized through a partnership between the City of Venice and

the C Foscari University, the aim of this initiative is to redesign the San Giobbe district, more

precisely a new open to public area of the Business School of C Foscari. This initiative will be

an opportunity for all citizens of the district to re-invent its social and cultural organization

and content with the other goers of the district: the students of the Business School, in a shared

and participative way, to shape the environment to needs and improve the quality of life for all

its potential users. Even if this project isnt running already, it will officially start in January

2012, we already know how it has been designed to function, and which are the instrumentsthat it shall use.
http://www.comune.modena.it/viaperviahttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://www.comune.modena.it/viapervia/percorso-partecipativo-2010/progettohttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://www.comune.modena.it/viapervia/percorso-partecipativo-2010/progettohttp://www.comune.modena.it/viapervia


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The two interaction platforms on ISN of the initiative are already functioning:

The page on Facebook: will be used to directly interact with interested users, it allowsvisitors to post opinions, send compiled postcard questionnaires of the initiative, and

videos. Moreover it gives basic indications about the state of the project. It could be also

use for surveys. The page on Twitter: The micro blogging updates on twitter keep citizens in touch with

the project, giving them updates about events, meetings, dates of release of new contents

for participating to the initiative.

Moreover, there is a e-mail address that is already active to

answer citizen questions about how to participate the project.

In the first phase the interaction with citizens will be very

simple and standardized, thanks to the utilization of the

questionnaire that you can see on the left side this page (click

on it while pressing Ctrl to see it I high resolution). Moreinvolving events such as community walks through the

district, laboratories for preparing proposals of projects and

meetings to choose the destination of public spaces and plan

the implementation of the final projects.

Now that we have descried those projects, we should ask ourselves if the abovementioned

communities are SMART or fragmented? If they emerged before the participative project or

already existed? If their relational structure and power equilibriums changed during the

initiative? If the composition of those communities differs from the classical political

pressure groups ones, that emerged spontaneously in the past five decades from civil society

to lobby political decision making? Unfortunately at the moment those are unanswerable

questions, because we lack of needed information to construct the officious relational and

power structures within those initiatives. Moreover, since e-democracy shifts political power

from institutionalized decisional centers to informal relational network levels, participative

democracy initiatives transfers the transparency problem from governments to more foggylayers for investigation, namely informal relational networks: this is for example true if we

consider the fact that Terzo Veneto gives the possibility to Unions and Professional Category

Representatives to propose drafting of laws, who within those Unions and Category

Representatives decide what to write, and, are those organizations democratic or at least

participative in the formulation of their proposals? When looking to professional roles of the

promoters, members and sustainers of those initiatives, like for many other e-democracy

projects, it appears clear that physical and emotive proximity, cultural similarity, professional

likeness and pre-existing pools of trust are critical to better understand the social processes

of engagement that will redefine governance (Coe A. and all., 2001).
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://twitter.com/#!/etucosacivedihttp://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=114752441974857&set=a.112139445569490.14993.111436905639744&type=1&theaterhttp://twitter.com/#!/etucosacivedihttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744


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Thus, if for public opinion e-democracy

refers to the direct integration of citizens

online deliberations to inform the behavior of

elected representatives in a non binding way.

Designed to enhance, not supplant the

traditional representative institutions of a

liberal democracy (Chadwick A., 2003), it is

clear that the involvement of the third sector

in public decision making will be much broader

and politically decisive in future. Nowadays,

within public organizations, there is a hidden

fight for the control of information contained

inside computers, that often determine which

organizational factions will gain or lose power

relative to others. (Moreover) computing

infrastructure is expensive, and therefore

those who control it govern a large investment

of the organizational resources. Finally, many

people perceive those who are engaged in

computing to be sophisticated and professional;

hence, computing brings some extra effective

power to those who own it (Peled, 2001), this professional power can be used to design and

influence participative public decision making systems for the interests of the professionals

categories that gain significance through the control of those systems; computing engineers

are probably the less hazardous professional category, that could or would wont to benefitfrom the control of participated governance instruments.

Well-established bureaucratic politics perspective conceives large organizations (and

networks) as consisting of a range of competing individuals, interests, and constituencies, each

seeking to control power resources to further their own ends. In this perspective, as

government becomes informatized, control over how information may be managed and

manipulated becomes increasingly central to power struggles. It may be objected that the

politics of convenience have nothing whatsoever to do with democracy, electronic or otherwise;

that choice should not be confused with voice. It may depend in large part on the extent to

which one is convinced by broader postindustrial arguments about the proliferation ofnontraditional repertoires of political activity and whether they can be stretched in this way.

But these problems aside, it does seem perverse to ignore one of the central claims of e-

democracy itself: a very old but important argument about scale in a democratic polity. E-

democracy renders political participation and influencing the delivery of public services more

convenient by shrinking time and distance, enabling large numbers of stakeholders to

deliberate and feedback opinion almost simultaneously. Aligning this value with a new

approach to the production and the consumption of public services extends the principle. One

could stop there with a classic new public management statement about the benefits of quasi-

markets for enhancing citizens choice (Chadwick A., 2003). The concept of coproduction (and

choice) is not only relevant to the service delivery phase of services management but also canextend across the full value chain of service planning, design, commissioning, managing,

delivering, monitoring, and evaluation activities. (Bovair T., 2007)could we also extend this

Example of network involved in a participated

public problem solving

From:Crosby B. C. (2010)


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concept of coproduction to participative decision making process through social networks? And

which are the threats of such a development?

A large area of e-democracy networking vulnerability revolves around what is known as

social engineering. At its most basic level, social engineering involves exploiting the human

element of trust, which is at the very core of social networking, thus even the simplestmenace of social engineering can irremediably weaken the ties between community members

that wish to participate to e-democracy. As a result, identity transparency and certainty plays

an important role in social interactions by enabling collective sanctions that safeguard

interactions, define and reinforce the parameters of acceptable behavior by demonstrating the

consequences of violating norms and values. However, individuals often choose not to enforce

social norms because of the (social capital) costs involved with sanctioning. If supported by

metanorms, collective sanctions are more effectively reinforced. A metanorm is a norm for

punishing those who do not punish deviants. (Jones C. e all., 1997) To efficiently work a

participated decision making quasi-market should consequently have identity transparency,

and a set of behavior norms and metanorms to guide individuals actions towards collective

public interest and community trust building. To maintain a certain level of embeddedness,

this kind of network must not get too large, in fact as we can see from our case studies

participative local networks rarely exceed two hundred members on their ISN platforms. But

can an initiative which involves several hundred members, within a community of several tens

of thousands citizens, be considered democratic? Certainly not, but it will certainly be

participated. Moreover, are people prepared to publicly establish or at least convey their

political, social and civil identity within their communities through participation?


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CASE STUDY: DISCUSSION ABOUT E-DEMOCRACY ON FACEBOOK

While searching for public administrations profiles on the most spoken social networks

(Facebook, Twitter Youtube, My Space), we found out that despite the number of pages for

informative/promotional purposes, in Italy, only few public institutions used the existing social

networks has instrument to build a double-side interaction with citizens, and even fewer

proposed a non-tokenistic way of participating to the administrative decision making activity.

Here is some data based on our researches on the Italian Regional Governments:

Region

Subscription

to

newsletter

or RSS

official

page

link to

e-gov.

platform

official

page

link to

e-dem.

Platform

official

page

link to

Facebook

page

official

page

link to

Youtube

channel

official

page link

to

Twitter

microblog

official

page

link to

My

Space

page

Abruzzo Yes Yes No No No No NoBasilicata Yes Yes No No Yes No No

Calabria Yes No No No No No No

Campania Yes No No No No No No

Emilia-Romagna Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Friuli-Venezia

GiuliaYes Yes Yes No No No No

Lazio Yes Yes No No No No No

Liguria Yes Yes No No No No No

Lombardia Yes Yes No No No Yes No

Marche Yes Yes No No No No NoMolise Yes No No No No No No

Piemonte Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes No

Puglia Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No

Sardegna Yes Yes No No No No No

Sicilia Yes Yes No No No No No

Toscana Yes Yes No Yes No Yes No

Trentino-Alto

AdigeYes No No No No No No

Umbria Yes Yes No No No No No

Valle d'Aosta No No No No No No No

Veneto Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes No

Total Yes: 19 15 4 4 4 5 1

As we can see from the table above, the ISN that is most commonly used by Italian Regional

Institutions to interact with Stakeholders is Youtube (through Channels), followed by

Facebook (through Profiles) and Twitter (through Micro-blogging). Generally Regions that are

considered culturally e-democracy inclined, like Emilia Romagna and Piemonte, use several

ISN platforms at the same time, smaller regions like Molise and Valle dAosta often dont

even try to develop e-democracy and e-government through ISN .

Since, at the present time, Facebook with more than three million page subscribers in Italy is

for dimensions and social appeal the most important ISN for the Italian internet community,


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we have chosen it, to build our e-democracy debate through an ISN. This is how we designed

and developed the project:

1. To start, we have chosen a name and designed a logo that could attract the attention ofItalian Facebook users, here they are:

Cittadini Italiani: Governiamoci con I Social Network

2. We have then wrote a statute, with the aims of the project and the means toparticipate(link to the chart) the content of the statute was organized has follows:

a. The first part should describe why (in Italy) representative democracy is notsufficient to achieve a social optimum and satisfy the needs of Italian citizens;

b. The second part should tell what is our aim, why do we think that participativedemocracy can be the solution to Italian Governability and Governance

problems;

c. The third part should explain why we need the support of other citizens tomake true our project and how and why should they help us;

d. The fourth and last part of the statute, should explain how to realize thisinitiative on other ISNs, and thus, explained which could be the strategy used toconvince public institutions to sustain and participate to the project, by building

a ISN profile, and using it for e-democracy purposes;

3. We have posted some questions to understand the commitment of citizens towards e-democracy, and realize if they wanted to participate to this initiative on Facebook,

then we invited all friends to answer. Unfortunately, even if more than two hundred

persons were invited to answer those questions, on average only one out of ten did it, at

least until today (24/12/2011). Here are the most answered questions with the results

of the surveys:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529?sk=infohttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529?sk=infohttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529?sk=info


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Lets try to comment those answers:

As we can see from the first question the majority of the ones who answered tothe question are apparently interested to an e-democracy initiative on Facebook,

clearly the condition of being seriously taken into account in final decision

making by public Institutions was critical for the determination of this result.

One of the persons who answered that he would not participate to it if done on

Facebook, told us, through a post, that according to him:

Participative e-democracy initiatives should be done only through physical, face

to face discussion in squares, universities or on newspapers, and that social

network policy making was the (d)evil of civil society, because people when online

do things to quickly and badly, preferring to copy others easily accessible ideas

instead of developing their own opinion.

The second question answer make clear that participation to e-democracyactivity is considered a leisure time activity by many persons, and that even the

idle (or good) citizen of which we spoke, should participate only when they

have free time. Unfortunately none of the citizens that answered those

questions was a good citizen or had free time, because none of them participated

proactively to this project. A Chinese fellow (a friend) posted a comment telling

that he could not participate to this initiative, we could thus ask ourselves if the

problem of censorship towards political topics is so problematic in China?

Nevertheless, I would say, that despite the alleged Chinese Government

censorship, this person participated more than his Italian colleagues thatprobably auto-censored themselves, and despite calls never activated to

comment and sustain the initiative, but they did answer some questions.

71,4%

14,3%

14,3%

0

0,0% 20,0% 40,0% 60,0% 80,0%

Anwers to the question: If pubblic institutions would seriusly take into

account your opinions would you participate to this e-democracy

initiative through Facebook?

I dont know

No

Not through facebook

Yes

44%

56,25%

0%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60%

Anwers to the question: A good citizen should proactively participate

to administrative and political initiatives within his community?

No

Yes, when hehas spare time

Yes, in a

diligent way


14/18

4. We have then posted some links to e-democracy platforms, forums and participativecitizenry guides to help potential users to become familiar with the e-democracy topic

and thus be able to discuss it on our page. This initiative was unsuccessful, probably

because links had too many information and looked to complicated and technical to

enable quickly people to understand the topic.

5. Since even people who liked (I likers) the initiative, did not post messages, questions,videos or links, we thought that people could feel embarrassed to interact with us

because they were recognizable, thus we appointed all I likers as administrators of

the page. In this way they could post opinions and ideas on the notice-board, without

worrying for what others should think, since the profile used to post things could be the

one of the administrators. Despite this attempt nothing changed, apathy (or maybe

discretion) continued.

6. Finally we shared on other Facebook users notice-board The Jante Laws: a sort ofsatirical praise of passivity and indifference of people, that tells us, how with ten laws

and one blackmail, a government could psychologically imprison people in a submissive

way of existing. This page was also an invitation to people to post their idle values and

advices to build a more free, inclusive and participative governance of society. The

posted answers, given their content,have not proved to be worthy of being mentioned.

CONCLUSION

Has we have seen through our case study on Facebook: nowadays, the majority of

citizens feel the need to give priority to the protection of themselves, from the

emergence of their personal political identity and ideas, that is much more personal

than the political flag that people are used to wave publicly. Conversely, more

entrepreneurial and socially skilled individuals use the possibility of expressing

their social, political and civil identity as an asset, that if ably built and established

through participative decision making process can become a social capital

investment.

E-democracy gives to each of us a double opportunity, with two distinct roads:

Use this expanded possibility to participate for social and political purposes, to transform us in active sustainers for things in which wetruly believe.

Use this expanded possibility to participate for social and politicalpurposes to maximize our social capital outcome and gain benefits when

retransforming this social capital into resources, information, influence

and control when needed.

The exclusion of everyday life, relations, and social approval systems from our

understanding of democratic participation is a serious misrecognition of some of the

most powerful modes of citizen engagement, which we have tried to illustrate

through this paper. We hope that in the future this topic will be studied and treatedhas a priority for e-democracy related issues.
http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=259232394140163&id=247632068633529http://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=259232394140163&id=247632068633529


15/18

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Online resources

Title (format)

A SOCNET Discussion on the Origins of the Term Social Capital ( forum) on

SOCNET

Via Per Via: La Citt che Partecipa (e-democracy platform)

Agenda del Veneto Digitale (ISN) on Ning

Carta dei Diritti Digitali (ISN) on IdeaScale

Carta della partecipazione digitale Wiki (ISN) on Wikia and IdeaScala
http://www.analytictech.com/borgatti/socnet_social_capital_discussion.htmhttp://www.analytictech.com/borgatti/socnet_social_capital_discussion.htmhttp://www.comune.modena.it/viaperviahttp://www.comune.modena.it/viaperviahttp://agendavenetodigitale.ning.com/http://agendavenetodigitale.ning.com/http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-dei-diritti-digitali/70129-16347http://it.democraziadigitale.wikia.com/wiki/Carta_della_partecipazione_digitale_Wiki:Portale_comunit%C3%A0http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-della-partcipazione-digitale/73911-16347http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-della-partcipazione-digitale/73911-16347http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-della-partcipazione-digitale/73911-16347http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-della-partcipazione-digitale/73911-16347http://it.democraziadigitale.wikia.com/wiki/Carta_della_partecipazione_digitale_Wiki:Portale_comunit%C3%A0http://diritti-digitali.ideascale.com/a/dtd/Carta-dei-diritti-digitali/70129-16347http://agendavenetodigitale.ning.com/http://www.comune.modena.it/viaperviahttp://www.analytictech.com/borgatti/socnet_social_capital_discussion.htm


18/18

Terzo Veneto (e-democracy platform)

Cittadini Italian: Governiamoci con I Social Network (ISN) on Facebook

Etucosacivedi San Giobbe (ISN) on Facebook and Twitter

Il consiglio dei ragazzi (ISN) on Ning

Come si realizza la Democrazia Partecipativa in Rete (article)

Democrazia partecipativa: l'Islanda, Facebook e la Carta Costituzionale (article)
http://www.terzoveneto.it/index.php?id=1http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529http://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://twitter.com/etucosacivedihttp://ilconsigliodeiragazzi.ning.com/http://giornalaio.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/come-si-realizza-la-democrazia-partecipativa-in-rete/http://giornalaio.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/come-si-realizza-la-democrazia-partecipativa-in-rete/http://www.corsi-web.com/corso_online/democrazia_partecipativa.htmlhttp://www.corsi-web.com/corso_online/democrazia_partecipativa.htmlhttp://giornalaio.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/come-si-realizza-la-democrazia-partecipativa-in-rete/http://giornalaio.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/come-si-realizza-la-democrazia-partecipativa-in-rete/http://ilconsigliodeiragazzi.ning.com/http://twitter.com/etucosacivedihttp://www.facebook.com/pages/Etucosacivedi-San-Giobbe/111436905639744http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529http://www.facebook.com/pages/Cittadini-Italiani-Governiamoci-con-i-Social-Network/247632068633529http://www.terzoveneto.it/index.php?id=1

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